Although I started thinking about how we regard food towards the end of last year, it seems like a very good place to start the New Year!  I was prompted by drinking tea made from Monkfruit, aka Siraitia grosvenorii, as part of a Cantonese meal in Chengdu in September, not long before my return home from China.  The food was delicious and I wish I’d taken photos but I was distracted entertaining a certain small boy!  Tea is the default drink with most Chinese meals but what surprised me about this one was its sweetness.  It turns out that the small, gourd-like fruits of Monkfruit, a member of the cucumber family, are the source of glycosides known as a mogrosides, some of which are 250 times as sweet as sugar. Juice is extracted from the fruits and used to make sugar substitutes which are useful as sweeteners for those with Type 2 Diabetes.

The commercial processing of Monkfruit to make sugar substitutes is a relatively recent development but the plant’s Chinese name, luóhàn guǒ (罗汉果), comes from the Sanskrit for an enlightened monk in early Buddhist traditions (arhat) and Monkfruit has been cultivated and used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for some 800 years. It has remained a relatively minor ingredient, however, despite its useful “cooling properties”, because it is difficult to grow. Now it is mainly cultivated in the Guilin mountains of Guangxi province, in southern China. The fruits are usually sold dried, partly because this removes volatile organic compounds which produce unwanted flavours and partly because fresh fruits have an unfortunate habit of fermenting during storage!

The Chinese book Fruit as Medicine says that Monkfruit simmered in water makes a herbal tea which can be used to treat heat stroke, throat inflammation, chronic coughs and constipation. It also states that the fruits, presumably fresh in this case, can be simmered into a thick juice and used as a sugar substitute in cooking.  The tea I was given in Chengdu, though, was made by infusing the dried seeds in hot water, making a very pleasant drink to balance spicy foods. It’s hard to imagine a remedy for soothing coughs being the default drink in a European restaurant! 

In the west we tend to see food and medicine as separate entities – a dichotomy which doesn’t really exist in China, where the link between food and health is much more explicit.  Eating the right foods is seen as crucial to sustaining good health in a way which we would do well to learn from.  Although the idea of balancing “cooling” and “heating” foods to maintain health is rather alien to us, and much of TCM is not supported by the kind of evidence base we like to have for medicines in the west, there is a lot of sense in the idea that we are what we eat.

Fuschia Dunlop, a British writer who has spent much of her adult life in China learning about its food culture and history, talks about Chinese people’s deep understanding of the links between food and health in her recent book, Invitation to a Banquet. The ancient concept of yang sheng (translated as ‘nourishing life’) is still seen as important – the idea that nourishing the body’s energy by eating the right foods will improve the chances of a long and healthy life.  The earliest recorded Chinese recipes are in a book of medical prescriptions known as Wushi’er Bingfang (or Prescriptions for Fifty-Two Ailments) written down around 300 BCE. A thousand years after that, the physician Sun Simiao stated that treatment should start with food and only resort to drugs as a last resort because of the inadvertent damage they can cause, likening medicines to ‘savage and impetuous’ imperial soldiers!  He said, “A good doctor first makes a diagnosis, and having found out the cause of the disease, he tries to cure it first by food. When food fails, he prescribes medicine.”  Many Chinese people still have that attitude, both for prevention of illness and for the treatment of minor symptoms, saying that ‘healing and strengthening with medicine is not as good as healing and strengthening with food’ (yao bu bu ru shi bu). Tonic stews with medicinal ingredients such as ginseng and goji berries appear on ordinary restaurant menus and, as dishes are generally shared, are enjoyed by everyone as part of a balanced meal!

Dunlop reminds us that the word ‘restaurant’ comes from the French verb to restore and that the original restaurants in Paris were places where guests could go for a restorative broth. There are obvious risks to self-diagnosis and using untested ‘remedies’ but clearly taking responsibility for our own health is a good thing; it’s hard to argue against that starting with considering how to adjust our diet or habits to boost health and well-being.

Li C., Lin L. M., Sui F., Wang Z. M., Huo H. R., Dai L., et al. (2014). Chemistry and pharmacology of Siraitia grosvenorii: A review. Chinese journal of natural medicines, 12(2), 89-102. doi:10.1016/S1875-5364(14)60015-7

I’ve just finished reading Invitation to a Banquet, a very appropriate gift on my return from China, full of all kinds of insight into Chinese food traditions going back nearly 2000 years.  

The garden and allotment are largely in hibernation mode after a period of wet, windy and cold weather, but I’m still enjoying leeks from the allotment, summer fruits from the freezer and this year’s batch of Damson gin. The first snowdrops are almost open in the garden.

We’ve been eating lots of lovely Christmas food but an undoubted highlight was lunch at Bubala, a Middle Eastern inspired restaurant in Spitalfields, London.  Oyster mushroom skewers with Tamari and Confit potato latkes were probably my favourite dishes from the vegetarian and vegan feast we shared, though it was a close call.